Futureproof (12 page)

July

Johnny, my boss, is a total dick and more high-strung than a paranoid schizophrenic in a wax museum. On the brighter side, though, I now know how to rack out a floor and nail it down
fast
. Hank has taught me all of this. He's from West Virginia and all, but he's not as ignorant as you'd think. He quietly absorbs Johnny's almost daily fits, all the while slowly stockpiling tools so that one day he can start his own flooring company. He's already promised to take me with him when that happens—hopefully sooner than later. I mean, because this guy Johnny—
fuck
.

One day last week he showed up at the job site right after lunch and we were thinking, there's no way he can bitch about anything today. We had almost two hundred feet nailed down and another four hundred aside from that racked out. But as soon as Johnny walked in
the door he threw his thermos across the room, acted like we just gangbanged his wife. He was pissed because we had tracked mud in the half-built house. A floor man always keeps his shoes clean, Johnny said. Look at my shoes, he said, do you see any mud on them? I told him he didn't have to walk three hundred feet through the mud to plug in the goddam extension cords at the power pole.

“I don't give a shit,” Johnny said.

It really makes no sense that we have this same goddam argument all the time. It's the contractors who decide which subs do what and in what order.
They
are the ones to blame. They don't pour the concrete driveway until the house is almost finished. It's a logic that defies description because if it rains for twenty days straight and you have to walk from the road all the way up the sludgy fucking driveway twenty times to get the tools in the house, that's what you have to do. They don't put the driveway down until last because they're afraid it'll get oil spots on it. And God forbid the buyers of a new home have to have a driveway with a little goddam character. They want to believe that petal-slippered elves put the house together.

“And while we're in a complaining mood,” I said to Johnny on that day last week, “how about you coming around on the breaks?”

“Breaks? What the hell are you talking about?” Johnny screeched in his high-pitched, psychotic Mr. Rogers Southern twang. Hank, ever dutiful, got dutifully back to work.

“I'm talking about taking at least two ten-minute breaks during the day,” I said. “To catch our breath and boost employee morale.”

Johnny turned his back to me and walked into the next room. I followed him.

“It's fuckin' hard putting down floor in eighty-five-, ninety-degree heat all day without a break.”

“If you want a break, work at McDonald's,” he said. He picked up a stapler and began nailing, the noise of which effectively ended the conversation, if it can even be called that. Regardless of how hard
you try to please him or at the very least make it impossible for him to bitch, he always zeroes in on something. You just want to find a mute button and turn him off. Hank and I have laughed at that scenario over a lunchtime joint on more than one occasion, and we've decided that it would be worth significant money to watch Johnny's frantic gesturing, the veins popping out of his male pattern baldness head, with no sound coming out of his mouth.

It isn't all bad, though. Sometimes, on good days, Johnny will be out running errands and we'll have the whole room racked out, the wood just lying there like a puzzle, waiting for us to nail it in place. And then we're off, flying across the floor with our staplers gliding over the boards, our mallets swinging faster than John Henry, the sweat rolling, our muscles all aflame and struggling, but invigorated and somehow more alive.

We hold speed competitions to make the work less grueling, see who can nail up the most floor in the least amount of time. It takes our minds off of the fact that we're slowly ruining our bodies, our backs and our knees, so that somebody with more money can live comfortably. It's that whole Machine of Capitalism Oiled by the Blood of the Workers thing.

I tell Hank this but he shrugs it off.

“It's either this or the mines,” he says. “At least here I can breathe easier. In the mines it's always pitch-black and freezing cold, even in the middle of July. You go in before the sun comes up, leave after it's down.”

“Well,” I say, “we deserve better. This is what they're always going to hand us if we are willing to accept it.”

“Who is
they
?”

“I'm talking about The Man, dude. Obviously. The people in control are always going to try to maintain that control at any cost. Which means that your people, the people of Appalachia, have been getting fucked in the ass without even the common courtesy
of a reach-around for years. There've been
billions
of dollars made on coal over the last century, and yet the people that have existed—or rather subsisted—on that land for years are still living in the fucking third world. No teeth. No education. All that.”

“I'm just trying to make a living,” Hank says.

“Yeah, and you're lucky you got out of the mines while you still had some lung left that isn't already blackened.”

As if on cue we both go into a blistering rendition of Metallica's “Blackened,” Hank holding up his hand in the time-honored devil's sign, with its two evil fingers.

“It's just like in Bosnia,” I continue after our musical interlude. “These goddam talking heads in their ivory fucking towers aren't going to do anything to help those people being slaughtered.” I'm a lot more educated about tyranny and things of that nature now. We listen to NPR every morning and afternoon, to and from the job.

“What does that have to do with the mines?” Hank asks.

“What does
what
have to do with the mines? On both counts we're talking about people being fucked over simply because they don't have the might to stand up to the oppressors that come along and try to use them for their own ends. I get so tired of this shit. Don't you?”

“I'm keeping my own head above water, man.”

“Jesus, Hank, that's exactly what they want you to do. They want all of us to be so downtrodden that we have no choice
but
to be completely distracted by our bullshit lot in life.”

“We've gotta get some more of this floor down, man. Johnny's gonna go off if he sees how little we've done.”

“Fuck it, I give up.”

“Do you wanna take the front end of the room or the back end?” Hank says.

November

I smoke joints now like they're cigarettes. I have my own car. I don't live with my parents. I don't have to impress anybody. Some days, though, I can't muster the energy to take a shit.

So when I wake up this one particular morning, I decide that I am going to do something positive this week. I don't know what it is yet. I've been pretty much busting ass at work and then coming home and getting as fucked up as possible before doing it all over again the next day. But that's about to change. This is the beginning of the new me. I am going to get out there, goddammit, and I am going to make my life exciting and possibly even worthwhile.

This is the crap I'm telling Hank while we rack out the latest floor.

Then Hank says, “I have cancer.”

I don't know how to respond. He's only twenty-one years old.

“Maybe you should try eating some fucking greens once in a
while,” I offer. Hank refuses to eat anything remotely resembling a vegetable. He claims that all he's eaten since he was a kid is beef and pork products with a side of something potato-based.

Oh, and corn. He'll eat corn once in a while. But nothing green.

“And maybe you should stop smoking those cigars, too. Or at least cut back,” I say. Hank, being from West Virginia and all—those people just don't hold themselves up to normal standards. He never tries to look cool or do shit that other people would think is cool. He doesn't go to clubs, and only demonstrates affinity for about five hard-core metal bands and Johnny Cash. His idea of the perfect day is cooking meat on a grill followed by chopping down saplings with a machete. Or seeing who can lift a two-hundred-pound rock and carry it the farthest. He always beats everybody at that event. Nobody can even come close to matching his strength. He prides himself on it. That is the law of the Appalachian Mountains. The strong survive, the weak are decimated and left to die without honor. In this way, he has already conquered everyone he left behind in West Virginia. He always wanted to be a woodworker, always had a love for the craft of turning a tree into a piece of man-made beauty, sculpted and formed into something more than what it used to be in the wild. We tread on this wood every day as we transform it into floors. Hank has conquered the trees. Hank has risen above. And though he'll probably never admit it, he has saved himself from the definitive doom of the mines. All that comes after is cake. Cancer or not, he's busting ass as hard as ever, strong-armed and ox-tough, and I just can't swallow it, that even this very minute he's being ravaged from the inside. There are no signs. He could still stomp the life out of me without thinking twice about it. All six feet, 220 pounds of him.

The only outward physical indication that something might be going awry with his body is that he has three semicircular bald spots at random points on his head. He says these have appeared because of the stress he is under. That's what the doctors say anyway. He says he feels no stress.

“It's just another steel-cage match, man,” Hank yells across the room to me over the buzz of the screaming saws.

“What is?” I yell back.

“This fucking cancer, man. A steel-cage match between me and the cancer. Only one can win.”

“How do you plan to win?”

“How can it beat me? I sit in fire for recreation. I sit in
fucking
fire.”

There was this guy on the news about a month ago. I think he was a soldier. They kept showing the footage over and over. You could tell he was a soldier because, although his torso and head were completely uncovered, naked, he was wearing these desert camouflage pants. He was in perfect physical condition, big as a wrestler. Muscular. Hair close-cut. He was being dragged through the dirt streets. There were beanpole-skinny black people all around him, spitting on him and kicking him, and he made no move to stop them.

His eyes were closed. His arms were above his head, making rivulets in the dust as they dragged him along by his feet.

And there wasn't a mark on him. There was nothing visibly wrong with him.

He was being dragged along and stomped on, his arms splayed lifeless.

He didn't have a mark on him.

Their feet branded him. They were spitting.

He was dead.

They showed these images again and again, more than a minute of footage, and every time it replayed I thought that this time the soldier would get up and grab some of them, ten at a time, grab them and strangle the life out of them.

His naked arms made rivulets.

He was naked.

He was dead.

There wasn't a mark on him.

February

Mom and Victor allow Jonas to spend the night, seeing as it's my birthday and all. He's been drinking every weekend with his skater friends from school and he knows how to hit a joint like a pro, too. Smokes cigarettes, the whole thing.

First to show up for my little birthday soiree is this girl Jenny, who I knew back in high school. She says she goes by Jenn
ifer
now. She used to date this asshole who couldn't stand any of the performing arts people. He was always calling us fags. So it was a surprise when I ran into her last week and she was clearly flirting with me. She gave me her number and kept touching my arm and everything. It was while I was birthday shopping for Andie. I told Jenny that, too, that I was shopping for my
girlfriend
, but like my uncle Sonny says, some women want you more than ever if they know you're already
tied down. That's when they want you the most. Women
want
to steal a guy from his girlfriend. They see it as a challenge.

And now here's Jenny—Jenn
ifer
—at the door. I had to call her. She was too intriguing to not call.

She hands me a gift bag at the door, puts her hand behind my head, grabs a handful of dreads, kisses me on the cheek, dragging her bottom lip across my mouth. I feel myself stiffen. Andie comes out of the bedroom and I introduce them. Andie looks annoyed.

A half hour later, after Jonas and Corey, Splinter and everybody else have shown up, even Animal Mother (despite the rampant ingestion of intoxicants sure to take place), Shayla knocks on the door.

Shayla—I
always
wanted to bang her. She went to Peckerbrook High, too, but I never spoke three words to her then. She probably would have ignored me even if I had. And now she's sitting in my living room.

“I told her about the party,” Trizden says, winking. Maybe he hasn't completely lost his coolness after all.

Shayla slides up beside me as I'm sipping a frosty beverage and whispers in my ear. “My birthday present to you is an
orgasm
.” She actually says that.

I turn and look at her. She's all sultry and shit and my mind is racing through all manner of possible ways that this thing could actually happen. And every possibility ends with Andie kicking me in the nuts.

I look her in the eyes. She has the greatest eyes. “I'd love to. God, Shayla, I'd love that more than anything. But this is actually, you know, my girlfriend's house and she probably wouldn't appreciate that much.” I try to make it perfectly crystal fucking clear: I want to have sex with her, for hours on end, but…I nod over at Andie in the kitchen.

“That's too bad,” Shayla whispers. Winks. Licks her lips before moving across the room and sitting directly in front of me, her legs crossed, her panties visible beneath her short skirt, her hand on one knee.

The rest of the night I try to soothe my epic sexual frustration by drinking heavily, which works to some degree. But then Shayla starts making out with my brother, which culminates in her fucking him in my room, on my bed.

Andie's happy, though. A potential Luke suitor has been taken out of the equation.

It's around this time, as Jonas is getting laid in my room, on my bed, when
Jennifer
says she can get us some coke. She says her dad deals it.

Andie loves cocaine. She says she used to do it all the time before I moved in.

I give Jennifer a ride home, which ends up taking more than two hours. Before we pull into her driveway she's blowing me. I am a horrible person.

I get an eight-ball from her old man for a song.

 

Andie is passed out in the bedroom when I finally get home. Beneath her, a pen still clenched between her fingers, is a notepad that reads:

I put the pad down and a wave of panic crashes over me. She could just toss me aside without a second thought and that would
be it. I'd have to move back in with my parents, because Animal Mother won't touch me now that he's on this anti-drug kick.

Back to the car again, my fourth or fifth wind kicking in by this point. I drive to the gas station down the street, the one with the $3 roses. I buy her two of them with some crumpled dollar bills and change from the floorboard, sneak back into the bedroom where the nearly inaudible clock radio is playing that Rolling Stones song “Angie.” I wake Andie by tickling her cheeks with the roses and singing the song in a whisper, except putting her name in place of the girl in the song. She looks at me half asleep, one of her contacts sliding down her face.

I ask myself if this could possibly be worth it, and then I think about all the other impossible shit that is the alternative to living here and give her a hug.

“You save me from everything,” I whisper. “You make
possibility
.”

She stares at me with zero expression. I can't tell if she's going to throttle me or kiss me.

“Will you be my girlfriend?” I say.

She hugs me back. Squeezes tighter.

 

Not a week later Jennifer's dad shows up at our house holding a knapsack. He asks if we'd like to do some coke with him. He's like forty-eight and he gives off the sketchiest vibes. But then he pulls out a Ziploc baggie
filled
with cocaine. He asks for a dinner plate and dumps all that coke onto the plate. It is a
pile
of cocaine, I'm talking about a fucking
Scarface
-sized mound of cocaine—a mashed potato mountain in
Close Encounters of the Third Fucking Kind
, this-means-something-sized mound of cocaine.

Jennifer's dad cuts out three huge rails. We snort them and then he cuts out some more and we snort those, too. Then he asks if we want to freebase the shit with him. Andie and I don't know what this means but we're like, sure, we'll freebase it. We don't give a
fuck how he wants to do it, we'll take the ride. Because despite all the jabbering away that we're doing, cocaine-inspired nonsense, there is always this little piece of our brains saying
more
. This is the most annoying thing about doing cocaine. I can't just fucking enjoy it because as soon as I get a good amount up my nose there are only four or five minutes where I actually feel really good. My stomach has butterflies in it, my head's in the clouds. But after those initial few minutes pass, I can't think about anything else but
more
. I have to have more. And fucking Jennifer's dad is taking fucking forever to prepare the freebase.

He takes a tablespoon full of coke, sprinkles in some baking soda, and boils it in a pot on the stove. That takes all the impurities out of the cocaine, he says, leaving only a small rock of pure narcotic, which floats to the top. He takes this rock, about the diameter of a dime, breaks it into pieces and hands us each a glass tube with pieces of steel wool shoved into one end.

We watch him to see what to do next.

He puts his little rock in the tube and lights the bottom of the glass beneath it. There is a loud crackling sound as the coke is melted and turned into a gas and then he sucks in really hard and holds it for a minute, then blows out a puff of smoke that smells like the smell in my head after these hours of railing cocaine.

I hit the pipe and feel the helium smoke enter my lungs. It is incredibly powerful, instantly removing the teeth-grinding anxiety, the need for more. And then, when I let the smoke out, feel my lungs constrict, I am in heaven. I am fucking flying. This is the most incredible shit ever. It's like a dream. I have never felt more alive or more unstoppable. I feel like I could run a goddam marathon or kick the biggest motherfucker's ass, save a baby from a burning building, catch a stray car by the bumper before it goes flying off the end of an unfinished bridge.

“You like sucking that glass dick?” Jennifer's dad asks Andie.

“Fuck yeah,” she says.

Are they flirting? I don't care. I need more.

She is looking at him expectantly. He is in command of the dinner plate.

Andie doesn't acknowledge me now. She doesn't take her eyes off the plate. She needs more. And there is still more than half the original amount left. I get up, pace the room while Jennifer's dad makes more crack. I look at the clock six or ten times. It's 11 p.m. This could go on for hours. We could be here until morning. And we are.

The sun comes up, loud beams of light pounding through the living room window. Andie is noticeably drained. There is soot on her fingers and on her face, on the tip of her nose. I'm covered in it, too. There is very little cocaine left. Jennifer's dad is finishing the preparation of the last of it. I have chain-smoked three packs of cigarettes in twelve hours. I have moved from the couch maybe six times, and then only to piss or pour more alcohol, which only takes the edge off slightly and doesn't render any of us drunk. We haven't eaten a thing since yesterday afternoon.

But at least there's this last hit. I just need one more and then I'll worry about eating and everything else. Jennifer's dad, dickhead that he is, has been divvying more and more out to himself and Andie, and I've been thinking about kicking his fucking ass but that's not even a possibility now. My lungs hurt. I am so tired.

After the last hit, which wears off in less than a minute, I'm ground up and hating everything. Jennifer's dad takes a taxi home, has Andie walk him to the door. He's probably telling her that his daughter blew me in the car on my birthday and now they're setting up a time to meet and do more coke together and fuck each other.

It doesn't matter. Everything is shit anyway.

I gobble six aspirin. Andie comes in the room. She is crying, saying that she feels really bad. I tell her I do, too. We try to lie down, sleep it off, but our bodies aren't in agreement. We are forced to remain awake. We have to live out the affliction. And yet, even while our heads are throbbing and our limbs are aching, we both know that if someone offered us more tomorrow, we'd do it in a heartbeat.

“Let's promise each other we'll never do this shit again,” I say.

“OK,” Andie says. And then she's crying again. “I feel like I'm dying,” she says.

“Me too,” I say.

We lie on her bed and lie there and lie there. Eventually sleep comes. We don't wake up until two days later and I have to go to work.

When I get home there is only a note on the coffee table and the cat purring on my lap as I read it.

Andie's gone with Jennifer's dad. He “needed” her to come with him to pick up some more blow.

She is gone all night, though she does call at around 2 a.m. and tells me that she is scared, that Jennifer's dad has taken her somewhere south of the city and won't bring her back until he's done with his business. She is taking small breaths. I know she's coked up.

“Are you fucking him?”

“I have to go,” she whispers. “I'm afraid of what he'll do if he catches me on the phone.”

She gets home around 5 a.m., her eyes big as saucers. I think about asking her if she's fucked him, but can see she's in the throes of withdrawal and decide it doesn't matter.

I pretend I'm asleep when she finally comes to bed.

She clings to me.

She's still got black soot all on her nose, lying there with her clothes on. I look at the wall for the next two hours, and then it's time to get up for work.